Blog - Page 3

Codename One 3.7, the "Write Once Run Anywhere" mobile solution for Java developers is now live!This exciting new release brings with it a surprising new overhaul of the Codename One GUI builder which now includes support to "auto-layout" allowing developers to place components with the ease of Photoshop or Illustrator..

On the eve of the release of Codename One 3.7 we are excited to announce the new Codename One Academy which will change the way people learn Codename One. We've invested a lot of effort in creating a smooth learning experience and we're launching with 3 live courses.

You know that feeling before going on stage to talk or perform. It's a knot in your stomach but also an exhilarating sense of excitement about what's to come... I've got that fidgety feeling of "can't wait to get it out" and yet I feel there is so much more to do.

Thanks for all the great feedback on my last post, I got some wonderful app suggestions from some of you and some interesting questions. Overall, there were more than 100 comments and emails so I apologize if I took too long to answer some of you. I already mentioned the focus of these coming courses is to let you create apps in a more practical form: "cook book" style. But while I talked a bit about the narrative and the course I didn't explain exactly how or why this will work effectively.

3.7 is almost here... Later today we will enter the week long code freeze where only critical issues are fixed. We'll publish the plugin release candidate for 3.7 soon and it will include some interesting new things that I haven't discussed at all!

I talk to a lot of mobile developers or those who are starting out in the field and by far the number one problem is getting a refined sublime app. There are too many difficulties and pitfalls along the way and the end result is often "sub par" in terms of the UI you want to achieve. We too bare responsibility for that. We focus too much on the technology and too little on making "gorgeous" easy. I want you to join me in changing that narrative...

Networking in Codename One includes so many different options and some very complex capabilities. This tutorial doesn't cover all the options but it tries to clarify the logic of why we have both URL and ConnectionRequest. It also explains the socket API types and which one makes sense in which situation.

In the bootcamp we didn't build just one big app, we built two... Or infinity... The first app was a restaurant ordering system that allows you to pick dishes from a menu and add them to a shopping cart. The second app was an "app builder" that allows you to customize the first app and then generate a native app based on that for your specific restaurant.

We received some interest related to Kotlin over the past couple of years and this has risen noticeably in the past month or so. Up until now we tried to be very focused on Java which is why we didn't add support to other JVM languages even though this shouldn't be too hard. But Kotlins similarity to Java and its special relationship to Android make it an ideal second language for us.

Text input is a very special case. Besides mixing the native and Java code we also need to deal with the appearance of the virtual keyboard which doesn't act consistently across platforms. This creates many complex edge cases that are just as problematic on native OS platforms as they are in Codename One.